In a student life survey earlier this year, the Crimson found that only about two thirds of the college's undergraduates have had a romantic relationship lasting more than a week.

Some Harvard officials have had better luck.

For several married couples in University ranks, Harvard has been more than a job--it's been a meeting place, a family and a life's work.

From Oxford, With Love

Jane S. Knowles, acting director of the Schlesinger Library, and Jeremy R. Knowles, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, came to Harvard in 1974. Both the Knowles' are products of Oxford upbringings and education. He joined the Harvard chemistry department; she, a historian, applied to be Radcliffe's archivist a few years later.

"We became a Harvard-Radcliffe couple without ever really intending to," Jane Knowles says. She explains that, at the time, there was hardly another job in the area more removed from her husband's.

"It was as different from Harvard as if I were joining the Gillette company," she says.

The Knowleses settled easily into Harvard life, and speak fondly of their early years in Cambridge. Jeremy Knowles' research went very well, Jane Knowles was excited by her new job, and both were thrilled by their interaction with new friends and their students.

But neither predicted what would happen when their oldest son, Sebastian D. G. Knowles '83, became a Harvard first-year.

"We delivered him to Greenough and after about four days, we received a letter," Jeremy Knowles says. "He was one mile from home, 200 yards from my office, 300 yards from his mother's office--we got the point."